Kelsey Timmerman

Author, Speaker, Touron

I’m sitting on the living room floor munching on Cheerios, watching Big Bird on PBS, and picking a new hole in my socks – hand-me-downs from my older brother. Mom tells me I need to pay close attention to the TV.

“PBS would like to thank Kelsey Timmerman,” a voice (not Big Bird’s) says.

That’s me. I’m so excited. I smile and dance around the living room wondering if my friends heard that.

–

I’m 29.

I’m driving home from work listening to All Things Considered on NPR. During a break, I’m guilted into donating to the station that I listen to regularly.

“IPR would like to give a big thanks to Kelsey Timmerman,” a voice (not Big Bird’s or Michelle Norris’s) says.

In terms of the previous post, if there is anyone that should be a red, white, and blue consumer, it’s the United States Government. I’m not sure how many hundreds of millions, if not billons, of dollars they spend per year protecting farmers and American jobs, yet they turn around and do something as stupid as outsourcing the production of our passports to save a few bucks.

I’m working on the books conclusion and thought I would share a bit on types of consumers. Actually, my intentions are selfish. I wanted to see if anyone else had any types of consumers they would add to the list. Let me know if you have any ideas or if the below passage rubs you one way or the other.

Are we bargain hunters that follow our pocketbooks more than our conscience? If so, we don’t care where or who made our clothes as long as we get a good deal. But some of us don’t have a choice. If we want to clothe and feed our families, we can’t afford to be anything else but bargain hunters. As much as we would like to…

This weekend my brother got married (I’ll post about that later with a photo or two) in Salt Lake City. Annie and I flew out on Thursday and back on Sunday. The trip to and from Salt Lake marks several travel firsts for me:

1) I had never been to SLC before. Ooh, pretty mountains.
2) I had never pulled wheeled luggage through an airport before.
3) I had never used one of those neck pillows on a flight before.

Two and three are signs of becoming a rapidly aging traveler. Soon I’ll probably be zipping through the airport on a beeping golf cart making remarks about young whippersnappers with long hair and overweight people.

On closer examination of the neck pillow, I discovered the following phrase: “Not for sleeping.”

You might remember my piece in the Christian Science Monitor titled “Frivolous gift or lifelong memory?” in which I take 20 kids and an old man into a Bangladeshi amusement park. If you were too lazy to read it, now all you have to do is sit back and listen to my hick %$#@ redneck accented voice (as a recent YouTube commenter called it) read it to you.

I’ve been farting around looking at Nike’s Corporate Social Responsibility info (there’s a ton) and stumbled upon this flow chart. If the point of this chart was to show how complex factory compliance is, it worked on me. I don’t have a PhD in flowcharts and don’t have a clue what it all means.

Apparently, I’m on some travel writing marketing list. I get a couple of press releases a day and a couple of phone calls a month about new products, books, and events.

Anyhow, Pepto is synergyzing with the Travel Channel, specifically the show Bizarre Foods with host Andrew Zimmern. The nice Pepto lady asked me if I read the press release, which I hadn’t. So she resent it. The release includes travel tips from Andrew, half of which involve Pepto. I’ve pasted it below the cut.

I’ve never used Pepto once at home or while traveling. This is for two reasons:

It is a word that I’m pretty sure I have never correctly spelled in my entire life. And, as a 3-time Spelling Bee Champion of Mississinawa Valley Middle School, I like to think that’s saying something. Lucky for me, I don’t think they ever include diarrhea in spelling bees due to its unseemly nature. Otherwise, you probably wouldn’t be so jealous of my 3 shiny spelling bee trophies because I wouldn’t have them….